At Nearly 40 Years Old, the Original D&D Gets a New Deluxe Edition

The reprinted White Box. Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast

Dungeons & Dragons is almost 40 years old. And as the beloved tabletop game nears middle age, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast has been courting the nostalgia of older gamers for the last year with new version of classic tomes, from reprinted 1st edition rulebooks to hundreds of forgotten and out-of-print gaming products now downloadable as PDFs from their website dndclassics.com. So if your original Dungeon Master’s Guide got tossed back in the Reagan Administration, now’s the time to grab a brand new copy of your favorite version of D&D.

On November 19, the granddaddy of all reissues arrives: a new, deluxe edition of White Box (aka “Original D&D), the very first D&D set published in 1974. Original White Box sets are rare, and can sell for $500 or more on eBay. The new version (in an exclusive image above) retails for a still-pricey $149.99 in an illustrated wooden storage case, a homage to the Original D&D’s brown wood-grain cardboard box.

“Many of our players have strong emotional connections to our classic products, but they may not always have access to their original books” said Liz Schuh, director of publishing and licensing for D&D. “We wanted to make sure that the best of that classic content was available for fans again.”

Known as the “Old School Renaissance” movement, this love of tabletop games is bigger than D&D — and growing. According to ICv2, the hobby game sector — which includes RPGs, collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, board games such as Settlers of Catan, dice and card games, and miniature games — is in its fifth year of steady growth. Attendance at GenCon Indy, the world’s largest tabletop gaming convention, has increased 75 percent over the past five years; nearly 50,000 attended in 2013, a new record.

And as tabletop games continue to grow, so does the interest in their past, with indie publishers producing hordes of D&D “retro-clones” of out-of-print gaming materials, and hundreds of websites springing up where fans discuss and trade old D&D editions.

Tim Kask, the former editor of Dragon magazine — and the first employee ever hired by Tactical Studies Rules, the original publisher of D&D — is glad to see the renewed focus on the classic editions, particularly since he thinks newer versions of D&D have stripped out some of the storytelling and imaginative qualities of the games.

“The game got so tabulated and charted that people forgot to ask questions,” Kask said. “I think what has been ‘ruled’ to death is that sense of wonderment, of not exactly knowing what is around the next corner.” He hopes the rereleases will allow players both old and new to experience the earlier creative possibilities of the game.

Of course, if you’re interested in the future of D&D as well as the past, its next iteration, D&D Next, is rumored to arrive sometime in 2014. In the meantime, keep rolling those d20s, and keep making — or failing, whichever you prefer — your saving throws versus nostalgia.